[2.98] A dream of a mission: the Stellar Imager and Seismic Probe

The Stellar Imager and Seismic Probe (SISP) is a mission to
understand the various effects of magnetic fields of stars,
the dynamos that generate them, and the internal structure
and dynamics of the stars in which they exist. The ultimate
goal is to achieve the best-possible forecasting of solar
activity on times scales ranging up to decades, and an
understanding of the impact of stellar magnetic activity on
astrobiology and life in the Universe. The road to that goal
will revolutionize our understanding of stars and stellar
systems, the building blocks of the Universe. SISP
represents an advance in image detail of several hundred
times over the Hubble Space Telescope. SISP will zoom in on
what today - with few exceptions - we only know as point
sources, revealing processes never before seen, thus
providing a tool to astrophysics as fundamental as the
microscope is to the study of life on Earth.

SISP is an ultraviolet aperture-synthesis imager with 8-10
telescopes with meter-class apertures, and a central hub
with focal-plane instrumentation that allows
spectrophotometry in passbands as narrow as a few Angstroms
up to hundreds of Angstroms. SISP will image stars and
binaries with one hundred to one thousand resolution
elements on their surface, and sound their interiors through
asteroseismology to image internal structure, differential
rotation, and large-scale circulations; this will provide
accurate knowledge of stellar structure and evolution and
complex transport processes, and will impact numerous
branches of (astro)physics ranging from the Big Bang to the
future of the Universe.

Fitting naturally within the NASA long-term time line, SISP
complements defined missions, and with them will show us
entire other solar systems, from the central star to their
orbiting planets.

If you would like more information about this abstract, please
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